


Adrift

by Enterprisingly



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst, Big Robots, Even Bigger Aliens, F/F, F/M, Fake Science, Jaeger Pilots, M/M, Mind Meld, Minor Character Death, Multi, Romance, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-21
Updated: 2013-07-21
Packaged: 2017-12-20 21:53:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/892313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enterprisingly/pseuds/Enterprisingly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"Your father piloted a Jaeger solo for 12 minutes. He saved 8 million lives, including yours and your mother’s. I dare you to do better."</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Pacific Rim/Star Trek Fusion: As the final days of a seemingly hopeless war drew nearer, Admiral Pike called former Jaeger pilot, Jim Kirk, out of retirement. Reluctantly, Jim agreed to give piloting another shot, despite the fact that he was still struggling with the death of his father and former his co-pilot, George Kirk. Devastated by the loss, Jim was pretty sure that he would never be able to Drift with anyone again. Until he met Spock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adrift

**Author's Note:**

> IMPORTANT NOTES:  
> 1\. This is a true fusion of universes and it's only loosely based on the plot of the actual movie, so if you're looking for a retelling of Pacific Rim with a Trek twist, this is not that story.  
> 2\. You don't need to have seen Pacific Rim in order to understand this fic, but you should probably have seen Star Trek.  
> 3\. The rating may go up.  
> 4\. I'm pretending that I understand a lot more about science than I actually do. You have been warned.

* * *

Humanity had always thought that alien life would come from the stars, and it did. Death, on the other hand, came from beneath the sea.

But that is not where this story begins.

* * *

**Excerpts from _The End of Days– A Comprehensive Overview of the Federation’s Last Stand_ by Gaila Diora:**

“On stardate 2037.021, eleven years before the opening of the Breech (the portal between dimensions at the bottom of Earth’s Pacific Ocean) a hole opened up within the walls of the Forge canyon, on the planet Vulcan, and a creature unlike anything ever witnessed before by a member of the Federation, climbed through.

It was bipedal and stood nearly 200ft high, it’s teeth and claws cut effortlessly through metal and rock alike, and it’s armor-plated hide repelled even the most powerful phaser beams and two of the three photon torpedoes that were eventually fired at it in an effort to bring it down.

The Vulcans called it _E’shua_ – Demon. 

It tore through the city of _Shikahr_ with ease, leveling skyscrapers and leaving millions of Vulcans dead before planetary defenses– previously regarded as the strongest in the Federation– were finally able to bring it down. The fallout from the detonation of three photon torpedoes and the corrosive substance produced by the creature’s rotting flesh left the majority of _Shikahr_ completely uninhabitable. 

The entire Federation was shaken by the catastrophe, but the hole in the Forge closed, leaving behind no trace of its presence, and the Vulcan practices of logic and pragmatism ensured that the planet began to recover swiftly.

Two and a half Vulcan seasons later, the hole re-opened and another _E’shua_ came through. This one took out _T’paal_ and the neighboring city of _Kuin_ before it was subdued. Then came two more seasons of quiet before another attack. Then a season and a half, a single season, half a season, two weeks, and so on.

By the time the attacks had become a daily phenomenon– less than two and a half Vulcan years since the first _E’shua_ arrived– the majority of the planet was in ruins, the total Vulcan population had been reduced to less than ten thousand, and the High Council, lead by S'chn T'gai T’Pau, was forced to admit that the only logical way to ensure the survival of their race was to call for a full evacuation of the planet.

On stardate 2239.185, when the members of the Council and their families, who had been sequestered in the safety of the Katric Arc, were set to leave aboard three separate starships (Note: it has long been standard practice for no more than a third of the Council to travel in the same vessel as a safety precaution), two _E’shua_ came through the portal at once.

Larger and faster than any of their predecessors, these _E’shua_ destroyed two of the ships before they could depart, and the third, badly damaged from the attack, just barely escaped. Councilor T’Pau was amongst the casualties, as was her great grandson S'chn T'gai Sarek. (Note: Sarek’s wife, renowned physicist Amanda Grayson– inventor of the Grayson Principal and later a key member of the Jaeger Initiative– and their nine-year-old son were aboard the ship that escaped.)

The Vulcan star system was declared a no-fly zone and the majority of the Vulcan people settled on a new planet far from their old home. Practical as ever, they soldiered on through their grief and focused on rebuilding and all was quiet in the Federation.”

“On stardate 2242.95, Starfleet intelligence operatives intercepted a series of baffling, panicked transmissions from the planet Romulus. Over the course of the next two years, the transmissions grew more and more desperate, though no less confusing. Despite their best efforts, no one was able to completely decipher the meaning of the messages and, as no official requests for Starfleet assistance were ever issued, the Federation remained largely in the dark about the situation on Romulus.

Rumors of _Aehallh,_ great beasts like the _E’shua_ of Vulcan, appearing without warning on Romulus spread about the galaxy, coming mostly from smugglers and the occasional refugee vessel, but with no official communication from the notoriously isolationist race and no way to verify the reports without violating the _Romulan/Federation Non-Aggression Agreement of 2218_ by crossing over the border between the neutral zone and Romulan space, the rumors remained just that.

When all transmissions from the planet abruptly ceased on 2244.26, the Federation deemed that the situation was suspicious enough to warrant action, and a covert team of Starfleet officers were finally sent to investigate the situation in person. What they reported upon their return sent ripples of horror throughout the Federation: Romulus had been completely obliterated, leaving behind nothing but radioactive rubble and dust– and traces of several of the compounds that had been found in the corpses of the _E’shua_ on Vulcan.

The passengers of a crippled Romulan trading vessel, _The Narada_ , who were encountered by the Starfleet team on their return trip, filled in some of the gaps in exchange for the team’s assistance in towing their ship to the nearest space station. (Note: _The Narada_ , which, according to the crew, had been headed to Romulus to evacuate their surviving family members, was caught in the shock wave produced by the destruction of the planet, and took damage to the majority of their essential systems. Over the years, some have questioned the truth of the crew’s story, due mostly to the lengthy history of distrust between the Romulans and the Federation, but in the wake of the destruction of their planet, the Federation Council declared a cessation of all political hostilities with the remaining members of the Romulan people, going so far as to grant them permission to settle freely in Federation space.) 

Reports from _The Narada_ survivors confirmed what most of the Federation already suspected: Romulus had fallen victim to the same type of extended invasion as Vulcan: giant monsters who came through a dimensional rift and broke down the planet’s defenses over a period of several years.

The only difference was that, without the scientific advancements that had become standard for the planetary defense arsenals of all Federation planets, the Romulan government had been forced to fight back with less stable weaponry and the last missile strike that they had ordered against an _Aehallh_ had been too close to a major power plant and had set off an explosive chain reaction that tore the planet apart in minutes.

Combined with the earlier rumors, this evidence hinted at something disturbing. These were not random attacks; this was total conquest on a galactic scale.”

* * *

In the summer of 2248, when Jim Kirk was fifteen and his brother Sam was nineteen, the two of them took a road trip from Riverside, Iowa to San Francisco, California to spend a few weeks surfing, partying, and hanging out with Sam’s college buddy, Lee Kelso.

Jim, who knew for a fact that fifteen was definitely close enough to eighteen for him to be entitled to do anything that his brother and his older friends were legally allowed to, and armed with a very cleverly forged fake ID, was having the time of his life.

Lee’s father was a wealthy real-estate agent who doted on his only son, and Lee had a massive apartment all to himself, overlooking the San Francisco bay. Jim, who was sleeping on the living room couch, made a point of getting up early enough each morning to watch the sunrise set the ocean water alight, no matter how hard he’d partied the night before.

They’d been in town for nine days when Jim was startled out of sleep, well before dawn, by a tremor which shook the building so violently that cups and dishes in the kitchen fell from their shelves and smashed into pieces on the floor. The lamp on the end table next to the sofa met with a similar fate. 

“Jim!” Sam called from the guest room, voice slightly muffled by the closed door, “You okay?”

“I’m fine! Is this an earthquake?” Jim called back, as he scrambled off the couch and carefully went to join his brother, arms held out to steady himself.

Lee’s bedroom door slid open just as Jim reached the guest room door. Seconds later, it too opened.

“Sure feels like it! Lee?” Sam asked, bracing himself in the open doorway.

Lee shrugged, and yawned nonchalantly. “Yeah, It’s just a quake, guys. You’re in California; it happens sometimes. But we should head to the stairwell; it’s the safest place in the building. You know. Just in case.”

The three of them picked their way through the shaking apartment and out into the hall, avoiding broken glass and overturned furniture as they went. The majority of Lee’s neighbors seemed to have the same idea, because the corridor and stairwell were both filled with people in various states of dress and alertness, all complaining about the inconvenience of an earthquake in the middle of the night. They settled side by side on an empty step near a group of pretty twenty-something year old girls, who Jim was pretty sure they had run into at a bar earlier that week.

Jim, who was still having a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that he was actually feeling _the_ _earth itself moving around under his feet_ , didn’t understand how it was possible for everyone to be so calm about the whole thing.

The quake continued for another few minutes and then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. Silence descended over the crowd in the stairwell for a beat, and then someone whooped, the girls on the step above them cheered, and everyone let out a collective sigh of relief, got back to their feet and began shuffling out of the stairwell and back into the hall.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys but I don’t think I can go back to sleep after that.” Sam groused.

Lee laughed and clapped him on the arm as they headed back towards the apartment. “Quakes in the middle of the night always suck massively. Why don’t we get dressed, grab coffee or something, and then come back and scope out the damage?” He glanced back over his shoulder at Jim. “That work for you too, dude?”

“Fine by me.” Jim said.

Half an hour later found the trio drinking coffee on a bench in the middle of the sandy beach, near the first major support pillar of the Golden Gate Bridge. They sat in silence for a while, watching the unusually high waves crashing against the shore as the first gleam of pale morning light began to creep across the sky.

A particularly large wave made landing on the beach and Lee grinned. “All that shaking earlier really stirred the water up. The surf is gonna be sweet as hell later.”

Lee took a sip of his coffee, before continuing in a similar vein, but Jim had stopped listening. He was transfixed by a shape on the horizon that was growing simultaneously larger, and clearer, as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the thing drew closer to shore.

It certainly wasn’t a boat. Jim might have been from Iowa, but he wasn’t an idiot, and he knew that there wasn’t a sea-faring vessel in the universe with a silhouette like that. 

A tingle of cold dread wound its way down Jim’s spine and he stood up.

“Guys…” he said, pointing at the thing in the water, “What the hell is that?”

Jim heard, rather than saw, Lee and Sam standing up as well. He was unable to look at anything other than the dark shape.

“Holy shit… Is that what I think it is?” Sam breathed in terror, and Jim heard the thunk and slosh of his half-empty Styrofoam coffee cup hitting the sandy ground.

At that moment, the sun finally broke over the San Francisco skyline and the world was bathed in light. As if that was the signal that it has been waiting for, the thing in the water reached the center of the bridge, reared up on to it’s hind legs, let out an unearthly howl, and smashed through the bridge as if it were made of paper.

All around San Francisco, alarms began going off, sirens blared, and the city that had just been settling back into a peaceful rhythm after the disturbance of the quake, flew into panicked chaos.

Less than a mile away from them now, and properly illuminated, Jim could make out details about the creature that he had not been able to see in the dark. It looked like a cross between an alligator and a shark with a massive bony crest, resembling an old-fashioned axe, that protruded from the front of its skull.

The three of them were frozen, paralyzed with fear, until the monster roared again and began to make its way past the wreckage of the bridge directly towards the beach, where they stood. The sound seemed to unfreeze them, and without a word, Jim and Lee tossed aside their coffee cups and all three of them turned and ran as fast as they could, up the beach and away from the monster.

The world blurred around Jim, narrowing into the sound of his brother and Lee’s feet hitting the ground, keeping pace behind him, and the towering buildings before him.

 _San Francisco is the heart of Starfleet_ , he thought, _and Starfleet means safety and protection. They won’t let anything happen to this city._

Jim’s lungs burned and his legs ached, but still he ran. He could feel the ground shaking again, and he knew that the creature must have made it to the shore. Jim was distantly aware of the sound of a squadron of fighter ships sailing through the air over their heads, the sound of phaser fire, and the roar of the monster. There was a sickening crash of metal against stone, followed by a violent explosion to his left, and Jim saw that one of the fighters has been smacked away and slammed into a high-rise.

More crashing sounded behind them as they finally left the beach behind and joined the seething mob of terrified people all trying to flee into the maze of streets.

At the edge of his awareness, Jim registered that someone was screaming his name over the din and he hazarded a glance over his shoulder. The monster was right behind them, though it was momentarily distracted by the arrival of a new fighter. It was not the proximity of the monster that turned his blood to ice though.

Sam had tripped over the curb and was laying in the street, sprawled out and clutching his leg, which was bent at an unnatural angle, screaming for his brother. Lee was nowhere to be seen. Jim pivoted and charged towards Sam. Just as he reached his brother, the monster howled again and swung it’s massive tail into the building next to them, demolishing it in a single blow.

In the space of a heartbeat, Sam forced himself up onto his non-broken leg. With every ounce of strength he had, he launched himself at Jim, wrapping his arms around his younger brother’s shoulders, tackling him to the ground, and shielding Jim’s head and torso from the deadly rain of falling debris with his body.

As they went down, Jim tried to struggle free. He wanted nothing more than to stop time and swap places with Sam, but he was pinned in place by the solid weight of his brother’s larger body and he could not break away.

Then a falling metal beam slammed into the back of Sam’s head. Jim felt the impact and heard the snap of breaking bone before his own head smacked into the ground and stars flared behind his eyes. Distantly, he heard someone whimpering his brother’s name– _Sam, Sam, Sam–_ over and over. With a jolt, Jim realized that he was the one speaking. Sam didn’t respond. Eventually, the world went dark and Jim knew no more.

It was four days before they found him. The photon torpedoes that had been deployed to kill the monster had all but flattened the city. If Jim had not been protected by the debris and Sam’s corpse, he would not have survived the blast.

* * *

**Excerpt from _DNA Analysis of the San Francisco Specimen, Section Two, Subsection A_ :**

“The specimen responsible for the San Francisco attack has been confirmed as a subspecies of the same race of beings as the _E’shua_ , the race responsible for the invasion of both Vulcan and Romulus.

Despite the dramatically different physical appearance of this specimen from any of those previously documented by the Federation– this individual clearly evolved to function with equal destructive capability on land and in the water– however, the DNA we recovered from the creature’s corpse shows significant structural similarities to that found in the _E’shua_.

Further study will be necessary to determine exactly how closely the two subspecies are related to one another.

Since they are not precisely the same as the _E’shua_ we’ve encountered on other planets, for the purpose of clarity we will be referring to this specimen (and any others like it) as ‘Kaiju _’_.

Kaiju is the Japanese word for ‘great beast’ and given the stature of this species, it seems fitting.”

**Excerpt from _The Jaeger Initiative Proposal, Section One, Subsection One_ :**

“The Jaeger Initiative Proposes that the best solution to the Kaiju invasion is probably the simplest: build something large enough to face the Kaiju in battle without resorting to the use of photon torpedoes.

Below you will find the all research done in preparation for the development of this project, as well as schematics and projected cost estimates for the construction, implementation, and maintenance of Jaegers: robotic exoskeletons of a similar height and weight to the Kaiju. Each Jaeger is designed to be operated by a pair of pilots sharing a temporary neurological link (the process is called Drifting and it's similar in practice to a Vulcan Mind Meld) to safely balance the mental strain of operating a machine this large and intricate.

Though the initial stages of this project may be complicated, those of us who have been working on this initiative legitimately believe that the Jaegers may be our best– if not only– hope for protecting Earth without destroying it in the process.”

* * *

An alarm was blaring somewhere in the distance, disrupting the stillness of Jim’s dream. He kept his eyes closed and ignored the sound, trying to return once more to the empty black silence of unconsciousness.

Someone was shaking his arm.

“Rise and shine, Jim. There’s a Category 3 Kaiju headed this way and we’re up for fishing duty.” His father’s voice cut through the haze that waking from dreams of Sam’s death always left behind.

Jim opened his eyes and sat up, taking stock of his surroundings, and centering himself in the waking world once more.

He was safely in his bunk in the Anchorage, Alaska Jaeger hub, not drifting in the darkness, buried under rubble and the body of his older brother. The events of that day in San Francisco were seven years and two thousand miles behind him.

The only similarity between his past and his present was the presence of a Kaiju in the ocean, and this time, instead of running as fast as he could to get away from it, Jim was about to intentionally seek it out and take it down.

Since the arrival of the first Kaiju, the Federation had not sat idly by. The galaxy had witnessed the loss of one planet and the total destruction of another, and the Federation was determined to hold onto Earth at any cost.

Thus the Jaegers were born.

Some people saw them as salvation, some as a temporary solution and a dangerous waste of resources. Still, others thought that the Jaegers were monstrosities in their own right. 

The only thing that Jim cared about was the fact that when he and his father were piloting The Kelvin, they could go toe to toe with a Kaiju and walk away unharmed. Never again would he have to watch a family member die for him. As long as Jim and George were riding inside the cockpit of the 300ft Jaeger, they were the next best thing to invincible. 

Fully awake at last, Jim stretched, and slid out of his bunk. 

There was a Kaiju to kill and he had no time to waste.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so this story is the fault of a lot of people. I'd like to blame my roommate [Avoxsus](http://avoxsus.tumblr.com) (who drew me art after I mentioned this idea to her, and pretty much ensured that I would write this fic), a [gifset](http://enterprisingly.tumblr.com/post/55889683314/your-father-piloted-a-jaeger-solo-for-12-minutes) on tumblr by Whitelaws (which inspired some key elements of this story and part of the summary), and a bunch of other people on tumblr who've been pestering me for this and all know _exactly _who they are.__
> 
> A great many thanks go to [Night_Writer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Night_Writer/pseuds/Night_Writer) for the wonderful beta-assist; without her this chapter wouldn't be in any kind of presentable shape right now.  
> 


End file.
